ChrisNTR

During the Alt.Net conference in Austin, TX, Scott Guthrie announced publicly that Microsoft were working on a MVC framework for ASP.NET. A video of this presentation can be found over on Scott Hanselman’s blog here but don’t be put off by the swaying camera too much, it’s definitely worth it. A few things which I find interesting about this implementation of MVC is that it will have the Django way of plugging in different projects that people may have created with the MVC framework such as forums or image galleries. This will allow a more contribution based way of creating web apps using the framework. Another thing that I do like is that you can have full control over how the code source comes out. So unlike the horrible source I’ve become accustomed to whilst using ASP.NET, the source will come out nice and clean, easier to modify styles with CSS and much nicer for various accessibility reasons.

As much as I do like (love?) the MVC framework without even had a chance to play around with it yet, I have a feeling that it will be used for a lot more simple web applications than for what you would normally use ASP.NET for. For me, as I do both PHP and ASP.NET, I have a choice. A rather simple choice. If I want to make a fully functional, high load web app then I’d use ASP.NET. If I just want to make a simple blog.. I’d probably go with either Rails or PHP. I’m not saying you can’t write a high load PHP site just initial set up and scalability will be a little trickier. But with the new framework I might decide to do those types of apps using MVC.

Whilst the MVC framework probably won’t change much in the ASP.NET developer view point, I’m hoping that it might make more of an impression with the hobbyist web developers currently using PHP to make the jump over to the darkside and give ASP.NET a try.